Saturday Social – Speed Reading, Space Travel and a Record Breaking Selfie

Bitcoin Space Travel

Bitcoin has recently been in the news for nothing but trouble, but now the Winklevoss brothers have brought it into the news for a whole new reason.

Using their investment firm’s website, they announced that they have signed up for places on the Virgin Galactic – the space travel company owned by Richard Branson.

One ticket to board the spacecraft costs a whopping $250,000 and the brothers will be paying for their tickets using the cybercurrency Bitcoin.

The brothers said of the decision to buy the tickets with Bitcoin that they wanted to support “a new technology that may forever change the way we travel, purchased with a new technology that may forever change the way we transact.”

Oscars Selfie Record

Midway through the Oscars ceremony, Bradley Cooper took a selfie of himself and Ellen Degeneres (the host) surrounded by a selection of other famous faces including Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep and Kevin Spacey.

The selfie received over 3 million retweets, making it a selfie record and actually breaking Twitter for a short while. There was a bit of controversy after the event, where it was thought the picture could have been a stunt created by sponsor Samsung, but they have denied this is the case.

Another part of the Oscars that was talked about a lot on the internet, was the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio still didn’t win an award, even after being nominated five times. There were some great reactions across the web mourning his lack of an Oscar.

Spritz Reading App

Spritz Technology have developed an app that enables users to read up to 1,000 words per minute – the term to be now known as “spritzing”. With this technology, a user will be able to read an entire 1,000 page book in just under ten hours.

The app works by showing the reader one word at a time in a fast timeframe. It then speeds up, encouraging the reader to understand the meaning of the word more rapidly. The app took Spritz three years to develop and can be learned in approximately five minutes.

According to research, when people are reading, only 20% of their time is taken up with actually processing the content in front of them- the other 80% is actually spent physically reading the words by moving their eyes.

Save the Children Video

Charity Save the Children have produced a heart wrenching video to commemorate the third anniversary of the Syrian conflict, where over 10,000 children have been killed, over a million have been made to leave the country and another 3 million have been internally displaced.

The video shows viewers what London would be like if it ended up in the same sort of conflict to that in Syria. It starts with a happy eight year old girl celebrating her birthday and over the rest of the video shows what would happen if she was then caught up in a conflict like the girls in Syria are.

The heartbreaking video ends with the line “Just because it isn’t happening here, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

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